Latest NATO Arms From US Found in Daesh Depot in Al Mayadin - Syrian General

Sputnik, 24 October 2017

First paragraph:

The largest Daesh storehouse captured by the Syrian armed forces in the city of Al Mayadin, in the east of Syria, contained the latest examples of NATO weapons from the United States, Belgium and the United Kingdom, Brigadier General of the Syrian Arab Army Hasan Suheil told reporters.

As ISIS Flees, Syrian Troops Find Arms Cache From US, NATO

teleSUR, 24 October 2017

First two paragraphs:

The Syrian Armed Forces have discovered a large cache of military arsenal from Western countries, particularly from the United States, left behind by the Islamic State group as its forces fled the city of al-Mayadin in the east of the country, according to Sputnik.

“We have encountered a huge arsenal of advanced U.S., British and Belgian weaponry,” said Hasan Suhel, the Syrian general who led the military operation to liberate al-Mayadin.

US Special Forces Collaborating with ISIS – Russia

Nytten, Eurasian Times, 24 September 2017

First paragraph:

The Ministry of Defense of Russia has published an aerial survey of the areas of deployment of terrorist group Daish (also called ISIS or Islamic State) in Syria, where we can see a large number of American armoured cars such as Hummer, which is in service with US special forces.

Distrustful U.S. allies force spy agency to back down in encryption fight

Joseph Menn, Reuters, 21 September 2017

First paragraph

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An international group of cryptography experts has forced the U.S. National Security Agency to back down over two data encryption techniques it wanted set as global industry standards, reflecting deep mistrust among close U.S. allies.

paragraph 6:

The presence of the NSA officials and former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden’s revelations about the agency’s penetration of
global electronic systems have made a number of delegates suspicious of the U.S. delegation’s motives,
according to interviews with a dozen current and former delegates.

GETTING JULIAN ASSANGE: THE UNTOLD STORY

John Pilger, 20 May 2017

First paragraph:

Julian Assange has been vindicated because the Swedish case against him was corrupt. The prosecutor, Marianne Ny, obstructed justice and should be prosecuted. Her obsession with Assange not only embarrassed her colleagues and the judiciary but exposed the Swedish state's collusion with the United States in its crimes of war and "rendition".

How Video Finally Proved That Cops Lie

Albert Samaha, Buzzfeed, 17 January 2017

BuzzFeed News reviewed 62 incidents of video footage contradicting an officer's statement in a police report or testimony. From traffic stops to fatal force, these cases reveal how cops are incentivized to lie — and why they get away with it.

Confessions of a drug cartel hitman on the run

Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy, Independent, 10 July 2011

Third paragraph:

“
For six days, in room 164 of an anonymous motel, he told us of his life as a professional assassin for the Juárez drugs organisation, a cartel that controlled one of the main drug trafficking routes from Mexico across the border into the lucrative American market.
”

The sicario A Juárez hit man speaks

Charles Bowden, Harpers, May 2009

Journalist Charles Bowden interviews a former contract killer for the Mexican drug cartels
who says he was trained in the USA
and that he kidnapped, tortured and murdered while he was a commander in the Mexican police.
This man subsequently was the subject of the film
El Sicario, Room 164 by Gianfranco Rosi.

“In his many transports of
human beings to bondage, torture,
and death, he is never interfered
with by the authorities. He is part of
the government, the state policeman
with eight men under his command.
But his key employer is the organization, which he assumes is the Juárez
cartel, but he never asks since questions can be fatal. They give him a
salary, a house, a car. And standing.
He estimates that 85 percent of
the police worked for the organization.”

OPEC ON THE MARCH: Why Iraq Still Sells Its Oil à la Cartel

Greg Palast, Harper's, April 2005

The following paragraph is quoted from the website of Palast, not from Harper's magazine:

Within weeks of the first inaugural, prominent Iraqi expatriates
- many with ties to U.S. industry - were invited to secret discussions
directed by Pamela Quanrud, an NSC economics expert now employed at State.
"It quickly became an oil group," one participant, Falah Aljibury, told me.
Aljibury, an adviser to Amerada Hess's oil trading arm and to investment banking
giant Goldman Sachs, who once served as a back channel between the United States and Iraq during

The world's first multinational

Nick Robins
Monday 13th December 2004
New Statesman

This essay suggests that there are lessons relevant today
in the history of the British East India Company. Robins quotes
Jawaharlal Nehru in The Discovery of India, 1944 on the
"The corruption, venality, nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early
generations of British rule in India," and says that in
Wealth of Nations, 1776, Adam
Smith used the company as a case-study of the undermining of liberty and justice.
Robins describes the looting of Bengal's gold and silver in 1757 after
Robert Clive won the Battle of Palashi, opium trafficking,
Edmund Burke's attempt to impeach Warren Hastings in 1788,
and many more things besides. Finally Robins mentions one case
where the company did not escape with legal
impunity. In 1774 a group of merchants led by Gregore Cojamaul and
Johannes Padre Rafael won a civil case against Harry Verelst, former
governor-general of Bengal. He
was found guilty of "oppression, false imprisonment and singular depredations"
for what he had done in Bengal
and had to pay 9,000 pounds damages and full costs.

MI6 chief heads for Cambridge

Guardian, 12 November 2003

Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6 who was embroiled in the controversy over the government's Iraqi weapons dossier, has been appointed head of a Cambridge University college, it was announced last night.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast reveals how Republican gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger is part of a larger scheme to help Enron and other power companies avoid paying back $9 billion in illicit profits by replacing Gov. Gray Davis. [Includes transcript]

Arnold's Enron Secret

By Greg Palast, AlterNet
October 4, 2003

Now, 34 pages of internal Enron memoranda have just come through this reporter's fax machine that tell all about the tryst between Maria's husband and the corporate con men.
It turns out that Schwarzenegger knowingly joined the hush-hush encounter
as part of a campaign to sabotage a Davis-Bustamante plan to make Enron and
other power pirates then ravaging California pay back the
$9 billion in illicit profits they carried off.

Schwarzenegger: Total Amnesia?

Santa Monica, CA --Internal Enron e-mails confirm that Arnold Schwarzenegger was among a small group of executives who met with Lay at the posh Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel in May of 2001, in the midst of California's energy crisis. View the e-mails. The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, which obtained the e-mails, is calling on Schwarzenegger to acknowledge the meetings and disclose the information that was presented and discussed. The meeting with Enron occurred ten days after rolling blackouts darkened California for two consecutive days; Schwarzenegger has previously said that he does not remember such a meeting.

By 2017 this has disappeared from
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/utilities/pr/pr003708.php3

Street of Shame

Private Eye, 8-21 August 2003, page 4

Second paragraph:

But here's the difference: no heads rolled. And, it now transpires,
the readers don't even get an apology. On 24 July the following brief
announcement was buried in the Standard: "A number of readers have
expressed concern that our front page picture on 9 April, showing Iraqis
celebrating the liberation of Baghdad, had been enhanced to depict
a larger crowd than actually existed. As it was taken from TV footage,
extra people were added to the image to fill the space left by the removal
of logos from the picture. In our opinion this did not alter the clarity
or truth of the picture's message but we are happy to make this clear."

The Galloway saga has eerie echoes of the Scargill affair of 1990

Roy Greenslade, Guardian May 8, 2003

A former editor of Daily Mirror now
admits that he printed
false allegations against Arthur Scargill in 1990.
While claiming that he himself was misled, he
mentions a secret service plot and MI5 and
points out similarities to the present campaign against George Galloway.
(For more information about the deceitful
campaign against Arthur Scargill, including more on the role of Roy Greenslade, see also
"The Enemy Within MI5, Maxwell and the Scargill Affair", Seumas Milne, Verso
1994)

Tracing the missile

Glen Rangwala
CASI discussion list, 31 March 2003

It seems that the US and UK government are still claiming that the 28 March
bombing of Shu'ala marketplace, which is being reported as having killed 62
peope, could have been the result of malfunctioning Iraqi air defence
equipment.

Appellate Court Rules Media Can Legally Lie

By Mike Gaddy, 28 February 2003, Sierra Times

On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing illegal about lying,
concealing or distorting information by a major press organization. The court reversed the
$425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by Fox
Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information.
The ruling basically declares it is technically not against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie
or distort the news on a television broadcast.

Academic humiliates copy-cat government

Reggie Vettasseri, Varsity, 14 February 2003, page 2

This week national governments were blushing and the
headlines of the world's media were screaming after a Cambridge
fellow revealed that the British Government's latest dossier
on Iraq was little more than a poor copy of out of date and
uncredited academic articles.

The dishonest case for war on Iraq

by Alan Simpson, MP - Chair of Labour Against the War
and Dr Glen Rangwala - Lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, UK.

There is no case for a war on Iraq. It has not threatened to attack the US or Europe. It is not connected to al-Qa'ida. There is no evidence that it has new weapons of mass destruction, or that it possesses the means of delivering them.

A Grad Student Mimicked Saddam Over the Airwaves

Broadcast Ruse

by Ian Urbina, Village Voice,
November 13 - 19, 2002

Word got around the department that I was a good Arabic translator who did a
great Saddam imitation," recalls the Harvard grad student. "Eventually,
someone phoned me asking if I wanted to help change the course of Iraq
policy." So twice a week, for $3000 a month, the Iraqi student tells the Voice on
condition of anonymity, he took a taxi from his campus apartment to a
Boston-area recording studio rented by the Rendon Group, a D.C.-based public
relations firm with close ties to the U.S. government. His job: Translate and dub
spoofed Saddam Hussein speeches and tongue-in-cheek newscasts for
broadcast throughout Iraq.

Into the Dark
The Pentagon Plan to Provoke
Terrorist Attacks

by CHRIS FLOYD, CounterPunch
November 1, 2002

This astonishing admission was buried deep in a story
which was itself submerged by mounds of gray
newsprint and glossy underwear ads in last Sunday's
Los Angeles Times. There--in an article by military
analyst William Arkin, detailing the vast expansion of
the secret armies being massed by the former Nixon
bureaucrat now lording it over the Pentagon--came
the revelation of Rumsfeld's plan to create "a
super-Intelligence Support Activity" that will "bring
together CIA and military covert action, information
warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception."

(Between 2002 and now in 2017 this article moved from www.counterpunch.org/floyd1101.html
without any redirect being left at the old location.)

Meet the new Zionists

Matthew Engel
Monday October 28, 2002
The Guardian

You might think these Christian activists represent the furthest
shores of American politico-religious wackiness. The politicians
don't think so. This conference began with a videotaped
benediction straight from the Oval office. Some of the most
influential republicans in Congress addressed the gathering
including - not once, but twice - Tom DeLay, who is hot favourite
to take over as majority leader of the House of Representatives
after the midterm elections on November 5, thus becoming
arguably the most powerful man on Capitol Hill.

Robert Fisk: What
the US President
wants us to forget

Robert Fisk, Independent, 9 October 2002

Secondly, because the envoy was
sent to Iraq to arrange the
re-opening of the US embassy - in
order to secure better trade and
economic relations with the Butcher
of Baghdad. Thirdly, because the
envoy was - wait for it - Donald
Rumsfeld. Now you might think it
strange that Mr Rumsfeld, in the
course of one of his folksy press
conferences, hasn't chatted to us
about this interesting tit-bit. You
might think he would have wished to
enlighten us about the evil nature of
the criminal with whom he so
warmly shook hands. But no.

President Bush
wants war, not
justice - and he'll
soon find another
excuse for it

Robert Fisk, Independent,
18 September 2002

Major Scott Ritter, Iraq's
nemesis-turned-saviour, was
indeed - as an inspector - regularly
travelling to Tel Aviv to consult
Israeli intelligence. Then Saddam
accused the UN inspectors of
working for the CIA. And he was
right. The United States, it emerged,
was using the UN's Baghdad offices
to bug Iraq's government
communications. And once the
inspectors were withdrawn in 1998
and the US and Britain launched
"Operation Desert Fox", it turned
out that virtually every one of the
bombing targets had been visited by
UN inspectors over the previous six
months. Far from being an
inspectorate, the UN lads - though
they didn't all know it - had been
acting as forward air controllers,
drawing up an American hit list
rather than monitoring compliance
with UN resolutions.

In war, some facts less factual

Citing top-secret
satellite images, Pentagon
officials estimated in
mid-September that up to
250,000 Iraqi troops and
1,500 tanks stood on the
border, threatening the
key US oil supplier.

But when the St.
Petersburg Times
in Florida
acquired two
commercial Soviet
satellite images
of the same area,
taken at the same
time, no Iraqi
troops were
visible near the
Saudi border -
just empty
desert.

ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

Bob Feldman
[clarion: no further information available, not even a date]

The multi-billion dollar Ford Foundation's historic
relationship to the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] is
rarely mentioned on Pacifica's DEMOCRACY NOW / Deep
Dish TV show, on FAIR's COUNTERSPIN show, on the
WORKING ASSETS RADIO show, on The Nation
Institute's RADIO NATION show, on David Barsamian's
ALTERNATIVE RADIO show or in the pages of
PROGRESSIVE, MOTHER JONES and Z magazine. One
reason may be because the Ford Foundation and other
Establishment foundations subsidize the Establishment
Left's alternative media gatekeepers / censors.

US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy

Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, August 19, 2002

In real life too, Mr Perle is not fighting his battle single-handed. Around him
there is a cosy and cleverly-constructed network of Middle East "experts" who
share his neo-conservative outlook and who pop up as talking heads on US
television, in newspapers, books, testimonies to congressional committees, and
at lunchtime gatherings in Washington.

The network centres on research institutes - thinktanks that attempt to influence
government policy and are funded by tax-deductible gifts from unidentified
donors.

Robert Fisk: Be very
afraid - Bush
Productions is
preparing to go into
action

They are setting up the
Arab world. We are
being prepared for an
epic supported by
Hollywood and a plot of
lies

Robert Fisk, Independent, 17 August 2002

It's not difficult to see what's going
on. It's not just al-Qa'ida who are
the "enemy". It's Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia.
Bush Productions are setting up the
Arab world. We are being prepared
for a wide-screen epic, a spectacle
supported by Hollywood fiction and
a plot of lies.

While media spotlights one
anthrax suspect, another is too
hot to touch

Delinda Curtiss Hanley, Arab News, 16 August 2002

Did the US media merely lose interest after
the government failed to find an Iraqi or
Al-Qaeda connection, and therefore could
not link the postal terrorism to Sept. 11?
Or was the press warned off the sensitive
subject? After months of silence, in August
the subject of the anthrax attacks once
again hit the newspapers and network TV
stations. The scientist in the spotlight,
however, may be little more than a hapless
"fall guy".

Selective Memri

Brian Whitaker investigates whether the 'independent' media
institute that translates the Arabic newspapers is quite what it
seems

Guardian, August 12, 2002

The reason for Memri's air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the
people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered
owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.

Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence
and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers,
Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

A Coup in The Hague

Hannah M. Wallace
28 June 2002
Mother Jones July/August 2002

"I was being expected to take
orders from the US delegation,
and to customize the
implementation of the
convention to the US demands,"
says Bustani from his home in
The Hague. "I was expected to
consult Washington on every
single issue, which I refused to
do."

Official TWA 800 Findings Challenged

By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid
June 10, 2002 Accuracy in Media

The TWA Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization, FIRO, has taken the unusual step of filing a
petition with the National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, asking for reconsideration of the findings on the
probable cause of the crash of TWA Flight 800. Such petitions are entertained only if new evidence has been
found or a showing that the NTSB findings were erroneous. FIRO claims that some evidence that the NTSB kept
secret and which has now become available for public scrutiny is new evidence that shows that the official
findings were erroneous.

Washington is pushing India and Pakistan to the brink of war

by Michel Chossudovsky
Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), globalresearch.ca , 23 May 2002

India and Pakistan are currently at the brink of war.

Presented by the media as a conflict regarding the status of Kashmir, the role of US foreign policy in feeding this conflict is invariably overlooked. Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has deliberately contributed --through
covert intelligence operations-- to fuelling the Indo-Pakistan conflict. In the wake of September 11, amidst new terrorist attacks and ethnic riots in India, conditions have developed which favour the outbreak of war between the
two countries.

Riddle of the spores

Why has the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks stalled? The evidence points one way

George Monbiot
Guardian
Tuesday May 21, 2002

Yet, while it trawled the empty waters, the bureau failed to cast its hook into the
only ponds in which the perpetrator could have been lurking. In February, the
Wall Street Journal revealed that the FBI had yet to subpoena the personnel
records of the labs which had been working with the Ames strain. Four months
after the investigation began, in other words, it had not bothered to find out
who had been working in the places from which the anthrax must have come. It
was not until March, after Barbara Hatch Rosenberg had released her findings,
that the bureau started asking laboratories for samples of their anthrax and the
records relating to them.

Statement of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney on Terrorist Warnings

May 16, 2002

Several weeks ago, I called for a congressional investigation into what warnings the Bush Administration received before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I was derided by the White House, right wing talk radio, and spokespersons for the military-industrial complex as a conspiracy theorist. Even my patriotism was questioned because I dared to suggest that Congress should conduct a full and complete investigation into the most disastrous intelligence failure in American history. Georgia Senator Zell Miller even went so far as to characterize my call for hearings as "dangerous, loony and irresponsible."

Today's revelations that the administration, and President Bush, were given months of notice that a terrorist attack was a distinct possibility points out the critical need for a full and complete congressional investigation.

AT MIT, THEY CAN PUT WORDS IN OUR MOUTHS

Gareth Cook, The Boston Globe, 15 May 2002

CAMBRIDGE - Scientists at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology have
created the first realistic videos of people
saying things they never said - a scientific
leap that raises unsettling questions about
falsifying the moving image.

In one demonstration, the researchers taped a
woman speaking into a camera, and then
reprocessed the footage into a new video that
showed her speaking entirely new sentences,
and even mouthing words to a song in
Japanese, a language she does not speak. The
Click for complete article (1089 words)

The above abstract was taken from the Boston Globe archive website in 2003,
starting at http://www.boston.com and searching "video MIT mouths".

In 2017 a different, longer abstract is available starting the search from
https://secure.pqarchiver.com/boston/advancedsearch.html

The Boston Globe will charge for the full article.

The full article says several
additional interesting things which are summarised here. The head of the team at MIT is
Tony F. Ezzat who is a graduate student. Also in the team is Tomaso Poggio, described as a "neuro scientist"
at the McGovern Institute for Brain
Research and the head of the lab where the work is being done.
According to "the researchers" (presumably Ezzat and Poggio), volunteers
in a laboratory test were unable to distinguish real and fake video clips.
Currently the technique only works well on a video
of someone facing the camera and not moving much, but according to Poggio it will not
be difficult to make it work on a moving head at any angle. It is also not convincing for
more than a few sentences because the speaker seems to lack emotion.
Ezzat says he
would like to work on adding emotion. In July 2002 they will present a paper on it at Siggraph,
a computer graphics conference.
According to Ezzat they are already testing it on videos of Ted Koppel,
a television presenter on a US television station called "ABC",
with the aim of making him appear to be talking Spanish.

The fake persuaders

George Monbiot
Guardian Tuesday 14 May 2002

While, in the past, companies have created fake citizens' groups to campaign in
favour of trashing forests or polluting rivers, now they create fake citizens.
Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are planted on
listservers at critical moments, disseminating misleading information in the hope
of recruiting real people to the cause. Detective work by the campaigner
Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy Rowell shows how a PR
firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a
crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.

UN Chemical Arms Chief
Ousted in U.S.-Led Vote

Reuters, Wednesday 24 April 2002

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The head of a global chemical weapons
control body was ousted on Monday by a United
States-sponsored vote provoked by a rift over his diplomatic
overtures to secure Iraq's compliance on arms inspection.

This article was once at
http://dailynews.netscape.com/mynsnews/story.tmpl?table=n&cat=50600&id=200204221746000279882&dpt=international

US ousts director of chemical arms body

Richard Norton-Taylor and agencies,
Guardian, Tuesday 23 April 2002

The head of the world's chemical weapons regulatory body, Jose
Bustani, was dismissed yesterday by a United States-led vote.

America used Islamists to arm the Bosnian
Muslims

The Srebrenica report reveals the Pentagon's role in a dirty war

Richard J Aldrich
The Guardian, Monday April 22, 2002

His findings are set out in "Intelligence and the war in Bosnia, 1992-1995". It includes
remarkable material on covert operations, signals interception, human agents and
double-crossing by dozens of agencies in one of dirtiest wars of the new world
disorder. Now we have the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and
radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims -
some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in "the war against
terrorism". Pentagon operations in Bosnia have delivered their own "blowback".

Robert Fisk: Fear and learning in America

Independent 17 April 2002

And for the first time in more than a decade of lecturing in the
United States, I was shocked. Not by the passivity of Americans
- the all-accepting, patriotic notion that the President knows best
- nor by the dangerous self-absorption of the United States since
11 September and the constant, all-consuming fear of criticising
Israel. What shocked me was the extraordinary new American
refusal to go along with the official line, the growing, angry
awareness among Americans that they were being lied to and
deceived.

Thinking the Unthinkable

Wayne Madsen,
Counterpunch, April 8, 2002

Now that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
has officially put the anthrax investigation on a back burner,
it is time for Americans to think the unthinkable: that the
FBI has never been keen to identify the perpetrator because
that perpetrator may, in fact, be the U.S. Government itself.
Evidence is mounting that the source of the anthrax was a top
secret U.S. Army laboratory in Maryland and that the perpetrators
involve high-level officials in the U.S. military and intelligence
infrastructure.

Fallout, Cancer and Politics

Matt Bivens
26 March 2002 the failsafe point, a new project
funded by the
Nation Institute

You've probably heard less about a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, completed in August 2001, but only published in dribs and drabs over the past few weeks. Mandated by Congress, the study is the first ever to estimate what effect radioactive fallout from nuclear testing has had on the lower forty-eight American states.

The CDC finds such fallout has likely killed 11,000 Americans since the 1950s. They died from all manner of cancers, from melanoma to breast cancer to leukemia. Fallout has also caused about 22,000 nonlethal cases of cancer. For those keeping score, that's 33,000 cases of cancer among Americans, courtesy of global nuclear testing.

Democracy for sale

Greg Palast, 23 March 2002

This page is an edited transcript of a talk given by
Greg Palast at the
Think Twice Conference in Cambridge, on 23 March 2002.

[Clarion: recommended reading. It includes information additional to that in his book
of the same name. The topics are: The Florida list,
Barrick and Bush,
The Bin Laden connection,
The Necessity Test,
Argentina and The World Bank,
The World Bank's biggest loan,
Step 3½ the IMF riot]

A spectacular miscarriage

Judit Neurink
Al-Ahram Weekly Online
21 - 27 March 2002
Issue No.578

Arab legal experts in Camp Zeist were incensed by the verdict. Whilst Libyan lawyers spoke of a trial that is politically motivated, Saber Ammar of the
Arab Lawyers' Union criticised "the influence of politicians and the press on the judges." Chairman Bechir Essid of the Tunisian Bar Association said he
was disillusioned with the Western judicial system. "How can you sentence someone without any proof? This is abuse of justice.,' he said.'

The United Nations' observer, Hans Kchler, an Austrian professor of Jurisprudence, was alarmed by the decision. He described the appeal as "a rather
spectacular miscarriage of justice." He was lost as to how a unanimous decision was reached "in the light of some of the analysis presented and
questions asked by the judges."

How one of the two brains behind the Iran-Contra scandal this week became one of America's most powerful men

John Sutherland, The Guardian, February 18, 2002

He and Oliver North were found to be up
to their necks in the Iran-Contra (guns for hostages) scam, which blew up in 1986.
Poindexter was charged and found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and
the destruction of evidence in 1990; this was overturned on appeal the following
year.

Friends of terrorism

Duncan Campbell, Guardian, Friday February 8, 2002

Reich used this role to pursue his own
agenda to such an extent that in 1987 the Comptroller-General of the US, a
Republican appointee, found that some of the efforts of his office were "prohibited,
covert propaganda activities ... beyond the range of acceptable agency public
information activities". A letter of September 30 1987 concluded that Reich's office
had violated "a restriction on the state department's annual appropriations prohibiting
the use of federal funds for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorised by
Congress".

Contrary Mary

Letter from Israel

Private Eye, 30 November to 13 December 2001, page 15

Take the bombing of American targets. Our chaps bombed the US cultural centres in
Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1954, planning to let Abdul Nasser's new Egyptian
government take the blame. Unfortunately the scam went wrong and our defence
minister Pinhas Lavon had to resign, though the director-general of his ministry,
Shimon Peres, managed to hang on. Today he is Ariel Sharon's foreign minister.

Legacy of civilian casualties in ruins of shattered town

Justin Huggler, Independent, 27 November 2001

First paragraph

We were picking our way through the bombed-out ruins of Khanabad when we heard the explosion. When we got there, struggling through the collapsed remains of houses, an old man sat in his blood blinking and shaking his head in bewilderment. Beside him, a 15-year-old boy lay bleeding and unconscious.

The disinformation campaign

Phillip Knightley, The Guardian, Thursday October 4, 2001

In the Senate debate whether to approve military action to force Saddam out of
Kuwait, seven senators specifically mentioned the incubator babies atrocity and
the final margin in favour of war was just five votes. John R Macarthur's study
of propaganda in the war says that the babies atrocity was a definitive moment
in the campaign to prepare the American public for the need to go to war.

It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story was a
fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti girl, coached and
rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance before the Congressional
Committee, was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United
States. By the time Macarthur revealed this, the war was won and over and it
did not matter any more.

PUBLIC SERPENT

Iran-contra villain Elliot Abrams is back in action

Terry J. Allen, In These Times, 6 August 2001

Calling George W. Bush and Jesse
Helms "public servants" is like calling
Iran-contra criminal Elliott Abrams an
"outstanding diplomat"--which is
precisely what White House Press
Secretary Ari Fleischer did when he
announced Abrams' appointment as
senior director of the National Security
Council's Office for Democracy, Human
Rights and International Operations.

Bush's Contra Buddies

Peter Kornbluh, The Nation, 7 May 2001

John Negroponte's nomination
to be US ambassador to the
United Nations is a case in
point. Bush has named him to
represent the United States at
an institution built on principles
that include nonintervention,
international law and human
rights. Qualifications for the
job: Negroponte was a central
player in a bloody paramilitary
war that flagrantly violated
those principles and was
repeatedly denounced by the
institution in which he would
now serve.

A letter from Alan Sked about UKIP published in The Daily Telegraph

Alan Sked, Daily Telegraph, 31 January 2001

A letter from Dr Alan Sked, who writes as "founder of the UKIP"
(United Kingdom Independence Party), and concludes with:
"Michael Ancram is wise to have
nothing to do with the current
leadership of the UKIP, and I
sympathise with all those principled
activists in it who will feel tarnished
by their leadership's lack of honour."

NOBODY'S HERO

Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, 22 January 2001

When questioned by an investigator,
Powell repeatedly pleaded faulty
memory. At one point he replied: "To my
recollection, I don't have a recollection."
He testified that he only found out about
the shipment of missiles to Iran on
January 17, 1986, the day Reagan
formally authorized the transfers.
Circumstantial evidence refutes this
claim. So does Oliver North, who
testified that in his 1985 efforts to get
U.S. missiles sent to Iran, "my original
point of contact was General Colin
Powell, who was going directly to his
immediate superior, Secretary
Weinberger."

Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2000

First paragraph:

DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.

Cluster bombs: the hidden toll

Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian, 8 August 2000

First paragraph

The number of civilians prey to unexploded cluster bombs is significantly higher than admitted by governments, including the British, which have consistently suppressed evidence about the weapon's military effectiveness, according to a devastating report published today.

Wheeler tells how he fought the good fight

Michael Evans, The Times, 20 October 1997, page 8

As the headline implies - with its missing quotation marks around "good" - this
interview with Charles Wheeler is a rather
uncritical one. Wheeler gives his account of
his relationship to IRD and related activities
when he worked for the BBC in Berlin.

MI6 fed Cold War propaganda to BBC

Michael Evans, Times, 20 October 1997, page 8

As so often, the newspaper headline is misleading, not least because the article also
describes information flowing from the BBC to MI6, including the betrayal of
confidential letters written to BBC correspondents. The sinister IRD is also mentioned. The
article consists of information regurgitated
from a book War of the Black Heavens, Michael Nelson, which
Evans says was to be published in November 1997 by Brassey's. (In a separate
article on the same page of the Times, Evans interviews Charles Wheeler, who features prominently
in this article.)

Dodi's girl-crazy double caused half the trouble

Maurice Chittenden, Sunday Times, 17 August 1997, pages 1, 3

First paragraph:

IF romancing Diana, Princess of Wales, and fending off his former girlfriend Kelly Fisher
were not difficult enough, Dodi Fayed faces double trouble. An impostor has been seducing
beautiful women and running up huge debts while pretending
to be the Harrods heir.

Iraq 'used US biotoxins in Gulf war'

Simon Tisdall, Guardian, 11 February 1994, page 13

First paragraph:

The United States government licensed
the export to Iraq of anthrax and other
highly toxic biological agents which were
subsequently used by
President Saddam Hussein
against allied servicemen during
the Gulf war, according to a US senate
investigation.

US admits years of atomic radiation tests on people

The reported "tests" include injecting victims with plutonium,
deliberately releasing radioactive materials in populated areas,
feeding pregnant women radoiactive material and exploding
nuclear bombs in the atmosphere over the USA.
Full article

Britain secretly helped to arm Saddam Hussein's Iraq

Preface from "Betrayed The Real Story of the Matrix Churchill Trial", David Leigh with Richard Norton-Taylor, Bloomsbury 1993

There has never before been such authentic and detailed material available about the operations of the British secret services and their influence on Whitehall - right down to verbatim copies of their own agents' reports and their internal memoranda.

Secret agents, freemasons, fascists... and a top-level campaign of political 'destabilisation'

Ed Vulliamy, Guardian, 5 December 1990, page 12

First paragraph:

'I CAN say that the head of
the secret services has
repeatedly and unequivocally
excluded the existence of
a hidden organisation of any
type or size," the Italian Minister
of Defence, Giulio Andreotti,
told a judicial inquiry
in 1974 into the alleged existence
of a secret state army.

The Gladio File: did fear of communism throw West into the arms of terrorists?

Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian, 5 December 1990, page 12

First paragraph:

A CHANCE discovery by
an assiduous Italian
magistrate investigating
a neo-fascist
terrorist attack has unearthed a
secret paramilitary network
run by units of the armed
forces and intelligence services
throughout western Europe.

How MI6 and SAS joined in

Secret Italian unit 'trained in Britain'

Richard Norton-Taylor/David Gow, Guardian, 17 November 1990, page 10

Third paragraph:

General Gerardo Serravalle,
who said the Italians trained at
a military base in Britain, was
giving evidence yesterday in
Rome to a parliamentary committee
of inquiry into allegations that
Gladio was linked to a series
of rightwing terrorist attacks in Italy
between 1969 and the early 1980s.

Nato's secret network 'also operated in France'

Guardian, 14 November 1990, page 6

First paragraph:

A BRANCH of the Nato-linked European anti-communist
resistance network, which Italian investigators fear
may have been involved in neo-fascist atrocities
in Italy, also operated in France,
the former defence minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, has disclosed.

Dead journalist sex smear 'foul'

Malcolm Coad and David Pallister, Guardian, 2 June 1990, page 3

First paragraph:

British officials in Chile are claiming that the dead defence journalist
Jonathan Moyle was a sexual deviant who hanged himself while
attempting to obtain pleasure. It is understood that
members of MI5 have made the same assertion in London.

Waldegrave makes tacit admission of SAS link to Khmer Rouge

Judy Jones, Independent, 14 November 1989, page 10

Second paragraph:

William Waldegrave, Minister of
State at the Foreign Office, provoked
uproar on the Labour benches when he
sidestepped a direct Opposition
challenge to say whether the SAS had been
training troops in Cambodia. "You
know I will give no answer," he told
Gerald Kaufman, the Opposition's
foreign affairs spokesman.

Liquidating Sukarno

The Times, 8 August 1986, page 12

Second sentence: "In a
book to be published this autumn,
The CIA A Forgotten History
(Zed Books) the American author
William Blum reproduces part of a
sensational 1962 CIA report
which suggests Supermac and JFK
talked about "liquidating" the
troublesome President Sukarno of
Indonesia."

Another exposure -by Tass

Hella Pick, Guardian, 31 January 1978, page 5

Pick reports on a report from
TASS about the IRD. Pick implies that the TASS report is a "selective
summary" of the
Guardian report of 27 January 1978. Her report does not refer to the
work of Richard Fletcher, George Brock, Phil Kelly, Paul Lashmar, Tony Smart and Richard Oliver
published two days before in the Observer.

Speaking Out I'm glad the CIA is 'immoral'

Braden says he was assistant to Allen W. Dulles in 1950.
He mentions CIA interference in trade unions in West Germany, France, Italy, India,
"Baltic ports", CIA payments for "strong-arm squads in Mediterranean ports", CIA financing
of the magazine "Encounter" and a CIA agent as an editor, CIA involvement in
an "organization of intellectuals
called the Congress for Cultural
Freedom".

Theobald's Pearl Harbor Challenge Called 'Service' by Fellow Admiral

W A Kitts, Union-Star?, 1954? But see notes

The book
"The final secret of Pearl Harbor, The Washington contribution to the Japanese
attack", Robert A Theobald, The Devin-Adair Company, New York, 1954,
is reviewed by by VICE ADMIRAL W. A. KITTS 3rd, USN, Ret